Towelettes, or wipes, find multiple uses in a bathroom or lavatory. In addition to housekeeping use, they can be used to cleanse or dry skin. Dry wipes are sometimes inadequate, however, when sensitive or stubbornly soiled skin is involved. Wet wipes are needed for this purpose but are rarely in a handy location, particularly when a need arises at the toilet. Wet wipes require container storage to protect against evaporative losses. The containers are generally placed on a surface remote from the handy wall location of the toilet tissue roll and may not be within reach for a person at need at the toilet.
The prior art has attempted to address this inconvenience. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,503,326 to Mikelionis, two rolls are placed side-by-side on the typical toilet roll spool. One of the rolls is dry and the other, pre-moistened. Each roll is one-half the width of a standard toilet tissue roll. The half-size is achieved by folding the tissues lengthwise, such that each dispensed tissue is one folded-over sheet. The moist tissues are housed in a cylindrically-configured container and are dispensed through a horizontal slot therein. Such an arrangement has several disadvantages. In the first place, it is unlikely that consumption of both wet and dry will be matched, so managing inventories of customized products may be expensive and troublesome. Secondly, dispensing from one side may involve unintended movement of the other side. The dry side is unwound by spinning the roll on the same spool supporting the wet side. This might cause a synchronous drift of the container and result in rotating the slot out of reach. Finally, and more importantly, the consumer is forced to pay extra for a specialty product in place of the ubiquitous, and relatively less expensive, commodity toilet tissue roll.
Synchronous movement is not a problem in U.S. Pat. No. 5,950,960 to Marino. Marino places dry and wet rolls in two separate but connected containers hung above and below a toilet roll spool mounted in a conventional wall bracket. Both containers are loaded through hinged covers, and the dispensing from one can be independent from the other. The structure is rather bulky, however, and would cramp tight spaces. Space encroachment would prove to be a nuisance, particularly when the need for the wet version is infrequent. Additionally, it involves equipment purchase and installation.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,354,598 to Masting resolves the space problem by storing pre-moistened towelettes in the core of a paper towel roll. Masting converts a vertical stand for the roll to a container with a towelette dispensing aperture at the top. While it known to dispense wet wipes from the otherwise available space inside the core of a roll of dry goods, what is not known is how to accomplish this from a hanging toilet tissue roll. A toilet roll is conventionally suspended from a spool connected to the horizontal arms of a wall bracket. The spool partially fills the core space leaving little room for alternative use of that space. The present invention presents a novel solution for accommodating the spool while providing access to the total volume of the core.